Football is played for 40 minutes and at the end everyone falls asleep

Maybe it’s the age, maybe it’s the heat, but I share the opinion of the majority: football is played for 40 minutes and at the end we all fall asleep.

The Euro is the essence of the loss of international football. The crowd came for the color, the beer (probably in Germany), and the national pride, less because of the football. Give him team football and he will fight for his life. Soccer teams? Is there a European team for which failure is a national disaster apart from Brazil? The unimaginable amount of immigrants in Europe has blurred the borders even more than the EU did.

Therefore, despite the deep difference in the concept of football, in the method of play, in style, in emphasis, it does not matter much who will win the Euros, Spain or England.

These two teams were not really marked as winners. Spain was counted less than France, Germany and also England. Because her team is filled with young and inexperienced players, and also because of the relative anonymity of her coach Luis de la Fuente who, unlike his opponent in the final, did not play for the national team and did not miss a decisive penalty for his team, but grew up in the youth teams.

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England was not counted out because of its coach, and not because of his lack of experience, but mainly because of his experience as one of the signs of defeat that characterizes the English national team, since it started playing against itself somewhere in the 19th century.

But losers is a relative term, certainly when it comes to England and certainly when it comes to Gareth Southgate. After all, England won one important title, on their soil 58 years ago, and another important title – the surprise of the century – when they lost to the United States in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. She mainly made a lot of noise from an audience, some of whom were drunk, and from the printing presses of the tabloids, but not the noise of a ball hitting the net.

Then came Southgate, yes, and paradoxically, he took that loserdom forward, to greater heights. There is no coach in the history of England – not Sir Alf Ramsey, not Sir Bobby Robson, certainly not Terry Venables – who managed to bring England to the World Cup semi-finals and two Euro finals within 6 years. These are the facts. Football is allowed to debate.

This is a very talented England. It finally has a stable goalkeeper, who was discovered in the youth teams, and despite the shocking team he plays for, he also stands out against the foreign goalkeepers in the Premier League. Kyle Walker who plays for Guardiola and Kieran Tripper who played for Simeone; The tremendous talent Declan Rice or Kobi Mayno, the English answer to Lamin Yamal’s bursting childishness, and of course the magical part of Bokayo Saka, Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, two-thirds of whom even play in non-English European super teams.

After all, if Spain hadn’t impressed so much in this Euro, there would have been no question at all about who the favorite was, so what is to England’s credit in this final is that they arrive as underdogs: the lack of a tradition of successes, an excess of a tradition of failures, and above all, football from heaven, numbing, slow and horrible (not sure in that order). So what? The irony. “Football is played for 90 minutes and at the end Germany wins”, became “Football is played for 90 minutes and at the end England wins on German soil”.

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Spain is the complete opposite. A fresh team, plays fast, compact, very Spanish, very efficient at the end. She scored 13 goals compared to 7 of the English, which is extremely significant in a tournament like this, even more significant when it comes to 90 minutes of play, where the Spanish scored three times as many goals as the English.

The good thing about Spain is the fact that it is impossible to name one specific player who led the team. Sometimes Torres, sometimes Rodri, sometimes Fabian, sometimes Olmo and always in the background Nico Williams or Yamal, because of the young age. Spain is special, it is loyal to the principles of Spanish football, and look who it beat: Italy, the host Germany and France. England encountered a really serious opponent only in the semi-finals, and the Netherlands, it must be admitted, is not always mentioned as a superpower. Spain is worthy, proving, deadly, attractive, everything needed to be a worthy champion.

so whats the problem. Let’s close the Euro with a Spanish victory and give up on the winner, because surely the bet rate for a Spanish victory is not very attractive. That’s it, it’s a sport, especially football, and if England hasn’t won a major title in 58 years, and it’s more boring, and less convincing, that’s exactly what’s scary about betting against it. Suddenly, in one game, anything can happen.

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England is not doing the way Greece did in 2004. This is England. Greece turned the game of defense into an art, an attraction, twice in the championship, it beat the young Ronaldo’s Portugal, France and the exciting Czech Republic, but that’s because they didn’t count it. England is counted, even if it is an underdog. When you walk around with the title of the homeland of football, and your league is even more attractive than Spain’s, certainly after the Messi-Ronaldo era, then you can’t behave like this.

Germany could not behave like that as a host, and tried to produce dominance in possession against Spain, which is their specialty. England will do the same. What will be decisive will be the courage to decide, the use of holding the ball not as a tactic but as a means to achieve scoring situations, and also the experience. And here the English have quite an advantage, certainly the English in the team coached by Spaniards, even if they are Catalan or Basque.

It’s going to be a fire match. Not because it will have exceptional football. In national team soccer, it is difficult to produce team soccer, but in the seventh game of the championship, these teams are already connected, even trained, and what will decide will be the internal battle in each player between passion and fatigue.

The heart says Spain, the brain thinks like the British intelligentsia: outside the box. Actually, what is important: the goal here is just not to fall asleep.